Home Repair

Our handyman home repair service provides reliable high quality maintenance services
to keep your property well maintained and looking great. Handy Sandy Services has a wide range of skills and works with a network of local contractors for small repairs and
odd jobs
to larger projects and renovations.

wood frame and cement/masonry repair

door/window replacement

dry-wall repair

electrical and plumbing fixtures

painting, staining and varnishing

decks and patios

fences and gates

Yard Work

A well cared for yard can make a well maintained home look even better. We offer complete yard care for your lawn and garden. Whether you have a small yard or larger strata, require gardening or
landscaping with an irrigation system,
Handy Sandy Services can help you keep your yard looking great.

mowing and trimming

de-thatching and aerating

fertilizing and lime

weeding, planting, and pruning

hedge trimming

mulch/landscaping

Odd Jobs

An essential part of home and property maintenance is tackling odd jobs in a timely manner.
Handy Sandy Services offers handyman services to get those odd jobs completed by using the varied skills
necessary to maintain your residence, second home, or strata.

Call us for your handyman needs:

Window washing

power washing

gutter cleaning

unclogging/repairing drains

window coverings/blinds

door locks and latches

exterior and interior odd jobs

Irrigation Systems

A properly installed and maintained irrigation system can make a well maintained yard an exceptional one.

We plan, install, adjust and repair irrigation systems. If you are considering an irrigation system, or you have an irrigation system that isn't performing properly, using too much water,
or needs adjustment call to discuss the solutions available:

controllers

valves and pipes

rotors, sprays, micro sprays

drip irrigation

rain sensors

irrigation leak detection and repair

winter blowout and spring setup

About Handy Sandy Services

Doing business since 2005 and a member of the Lighthouse Country Business Association,
Handy Sandy Services in Bowser offers reliable handyman home maintenance services from
repairs to renovations, providing home repair, yard care and irrigation sytems.

(403 error) Handy Sandy Services can't give you that page

Select the menu options, the Handy Sandy logo heading, click the tour switch in the upper right corner
or sit back and watch the tour to be on your way to learning about the many Handy Sandy services offered.
Whatever your property maintenance needs, Handy Sandy Services can get the job done.

(404 error) Handy Sandy Services can fix what's broken

Select the menu options, the Handy Sandy logo heading, click the tour switch in the upper right corner,
or just sit back and watch the tour to be on your way to having Handy Sandy Services fix whatever is broken.

About the Handy Sandy Services website:

Overview:

The website for Handy Sandy Services was created to augment extensive local presence in Bowser BC,
while consuming minimum resources of time and capital. The website is meant to act as an electronic
business card of sorts (and includes a rough vcard in the about page as well) for initial contact
and subsequently for reference to existing customers. The overall design of the website is consistent
with the existing marketing, business card, logos, and roadside signboards.

Design:

The website is designed as a single page website for several reasons:

non-scalable business (e-storefront possible, but not likely profitable)

integration of all resources, including 403/404 pages in a consistent framework

minimize bandwidth, particularly when left in 'tour' mode on smartphones

"adaptable" design:

To service our audience the website adapts to the device (popularly misnamed 'responsive').
The size, aspect ratio, orientation and text sizes scale reasonably well, given a broad range of
supported browsers.

Design tradeoffs:

In the various tradeoffs, was the desire to maintain the look of the pre-existing
business card,complete with
border, and the importance of keeping the contact info on a sticky footer. This results in some browsers
leaving a bit of underflow (going under the footer) but gains wider browser support.
We also traded 'being semantically correct' for better representation of the website.
Whether CSS3, html, jscript, menus, or SEO, we opted to stay true to the business card style that is
well known to our customers. This clean and simple look fits well with the overall 'conversion goal'
of the website, namely that the website visitor give Sandy at Handy Sandy Services a call. It does not
attempt to quantify this via analytics or web stats as would be more appropriate for a larger
organization (in short we define 'conversion' when our phone rings and we answer).

Additional content:

In contrast to businesses with a potential global footprint, local
contractors may not benefit from blogs, top 10 lists, and instructional videos. To these types of businesses,
the proliferation of smartphones/small screen devices and the localization of the internet, a website that gets
their phone number/email in front of prospective customers is essential for converting a sale. Some
features, such as adding a blog may sound interesting, but would siphon off resources from profitable work,
particularly if one wants to do it well. An e-storefront could be added, but at present the economics indicate
it would be unprofitable, and at best minimally profitable. Should the website expand in those areas the
single page approach should be re-evaluated.

SEO, htaccess, 403/404 error pages:

Prior to adding internal links, the website required use of parameter configuration in google webmaster tools.
This consists of defining ?page=x as pagination of content. With the internal links this may long be necessary.
Also of note is that google handles hidden content fine, possibly because the content can be specified via
command line parameter (?page=0-5,403,404,411). Google+ is used to link to the
website with verified owner style which helps google and other SEs validate the website. The exposure of
google+ eliminates the need to try to optimize and allows the website to focus on delivering the best experience
to the user rather than SEO. Htaccess had to be configured with a full path (not usually
recommended) to get the host server to pass the ?page=404 on a 404 error. The tradeoff means that just get anywhere
into www.handysandyservices.ca and the user is taken care of (even www.handysandyservices.ca/alskdfj.jdk is fine).
While most 403/404 error pages are intent on humor or pointing out some grievous error, we prefer to work
that error into our regular work; after all that's what Handy Sandy Services does.. fix stuff.

Summary:

The result is a compact small business website that adapts (or misnamed 'responsive') from a business card
blackberry sized device to large screen trade-show presentation without losing sense of proportion and most
importantly without losing the essential elements for converting the web-user to a customer. There are
many items that can be improved, such as the following:

tighten jscript, separate library

compress, possibly gzip, minify css/html

improve pictures, enhance 'tour' switch to graphic

improve kml map, remove from appearing in indexes

At present these items don't justify the effort (to put it simply they are diminishing returns) but may
be addressed in the future

While this adaptive (responsive) website uses fairly advanced CSS3, HTML5, jscript, integrated 404/403, and
does reasonably well in SEO, it maintains wide browser support while keeping a user presentation
that is clean, matches the brand and supports the brick and mortar handyman service without continued maintenance.
This website concept could be applicable to other small non-scalable businesses to build on their
brand while maintaining a professional look.